


storm's eye

by ambassador319



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/F, actual tooth rotting fluff, like I'm not kidding, you ain't ready
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 15:50:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20176846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambassador319/pseuds/ambassador319
Summary: a few deleted scenes from the 3x04 sleepover."There is streetlight in the window and it's picking out little random bits of Max's hair, the creases in her sleep shirt where El can see her breathing. Last week Joyce brought El a packet of glow-in-the-dark stars, and they didn't really glow, only barely, a search party of distant flashlights on her ceiling. Max looks like that."





	storm's eye

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is open to interpretation. I love the #elmax friendship. I think it's so important for the representation of women in media and for the storyline where El finds herself (hell yes!!) Personally, though, I wrote this about being fourteen and not having a word for love yet: when possibilities burn in your hands like superpowers, and you just want your crush to, like, make you some hot chocolate or something. Take what you will from it. Hope you enjoy :)

El can't sleep.

The room is staticky and soft. It isn't like nighttime at Hopper's, when she curls close to the wall and lets Mike's radio voice or the drone of the TV nudge her into sleep. This is a different kind of static. Like if she reached over and poked the back of Max's shoulder, her finger would buzz. 

She tucks her fingers safely back into fists. She shouldn't wake Max. There is streetlight in the window and it's picking out little random bits of Max's hair, the creases in her sleep shirt where El can see her breathing. Last week Joyce brought El a packet of glow-in-the-dark stars, and they didn't really glow, only barely, a search party of distant flashlights on her ceiling. Max looks like that. 

Slowly, El turns onto her back and stares into the dark instead. Her throat is scratchy. Her hair scratches at the back of her neck. Maybe she should get up and brush it. A magazine at the mall said your hair should always be properly taken care of, or you'll feel very "unkempt". El feels unkempt. She feels disheveled and haphazard and altogether out of place. Her neck is itchy.

And she can't stop thinking about Billy. His voice runs horrible circles around her head like a merry-go-round. _ I did _ ** _not_ ** _ quite catch your name. _

She isn't scared of him. She _ isn't. _The scary thing about Billy is that Billy is weird, and wrong; he's not him. He must be _it. _

Thunder. Max makes a noise in her sleep. El rears up on her elbows, then her hands. Outside the blinds the world is wet amber and blue, and streaks of it slip into the room, quivering like lost little kids. An echo of rain gurgles in the gutters of the house. El hopes the storm picks up again; her movements are deafening as she tugs off the blankets and edges out the door. 

She means to go to the bathroom. Just to flick on the lights and look in the mirror, at something blindingly bright and solid, before she goes back to Max’s room to try again at sleeping. But the quiet stretch of the hallway calls to her. With only a few furtive glances back she lays a hand on the Mayfields’ front door and eases it open. 

The porch is blissfully cold. El tilts up her face to breathe in the night air. It’s strange, but a part of her always believes she belongs here, in the cold and in the dark. 

This is peaceful. Like the void; except she can make out shapes and shadows. Streetlight. A glimmer of wet grass. Stormclouds, lurking overhead of the houses. There isn't anyplace to sit, so El sinks down against the weatherboards of the house, lets herself study the patterns of moonlight scattered like piles of wet leaves over Max's street. The eye of the storm— the real storm, not any Upside-Down Mind-Flayer whirlwind— blankets her in quiet. El thinks she could fall asleep here. Right here. Let Max find her in the morning.

The door creaks. She jolts; a brief, awful thought: _ Billy? _

"El?" 

It's Max. Lowering her hands, El swallows, and looks up. "Hi."

The lines of Max's face are scrawled and messy. She's squinting like she's still mostly asleep. "Hi. What's wrong with my room?"

"Nothing," El says. 

"It's super cold out here."

"Yes."

There's a soft scuffling noise; Max is kicking, kind of, at the doorframe. El sees her sway on her feet. "Come inside?"

El hesitates. She should go back inside. The storm's eye is nice; the quiet protects her from thoughts of Billy, but like Hopper always says, she just has to grow up. Get back in there. Ignore the staticky gutter-rain in Max's room. Go to sleep. If it were Mike asking, she would already have gotten up and gone to him: told him she was okay, taken his hands, led him back behind the bedroom door. There was no question about it, really.

But Max always says she doesn't have to be what other people want. It is okay to take things for yourself. 

El stays where she is.

It's nice how Max doesn't say anything to that. It's probably for the best when she turns and leaves. El lets her head fall back on the weatherboards. She closes her eyes. 

The rain picks up.

And up. And up. The rain approaches like a roll of thunder, turning from a splutter to a rumble and into a rhythmless roar. Stray spray speckles the porch. A stench of iron thickens the air. El can't see the road, can't hear anything staticky except the thunder of the rain, and then—

_ Slam! _A door shuts. El's eyes fly open and for a second everything is all wobbly like a new day, and then into focus comes Max. She sits down close enough to El so that their knees knock and passes her a mug speckled with little flaking rainbows. "Hot chocolate," she declares. "Watch out, it's hot." 

El stares. And then she blows on her hot chocolate, because it really is hot. 

"So," Max almost-shouts; not too loud, but loud enough to fight out the storm: "What's up?" 

El shrugs, digging her heels into the damp porch. A socked foot kicks at hers. She looks up. Max has her mug under her chin; she's holding it with two hands, so the sleeves of her sleep shirt droop obviously down to her elbows, but Max has never seemed to care how she looks; and over the top of the mug, she's looking at her. El's never seen her look at anyone like that. With that specific kind of ferocious, foundationless focus, like El is some puzzle she just _ has _ to figure out. 

"Come on, El, you can tell me," Max tells her. "I'm not like one of those stupid boys."

El doesn't know what to say. 

"Or— I mean, we could just sit here until you finish that. It'd be totally boring," Max continues, a quirk of a smile growing on her face, "And dark, and cold, and really rainy. But we could do that." 

There's a beat of silence. Still, El can't find the right words. She wants to _ hit _ the words sometimes. They never work how they're supposed to, not for her. "I don't..." She pauses. "Feel safe."

Max frowned. “El, we’ve been over this. Billy's not a problem."

"What if he is?" The blood. The ice. It can't all have been a coincidence. 

"He isn't!" 

"He could be."

"He isn't," Max insists, words mixed with thunder, "I know it. My brother's an asshole, but he didn't kill Heather, okay?" 

El closes her mouth, glances down at her knees. They sit in silence in the middle of the storm. 

"Sorry," El mutters. "I don't know Billy. He isn't the reason I came out here."

It takes Max a moment to reply. When she does, she is less the girl who tugged El through the mall last week and more the person who went with her to Billy's house: her hair is still dark and damp from a tear in the hood of her raincoat, and her eyes listen instead of talk. "What is?" she asks. 

El wants to hide her face. She wants the safety of her room at Hopper's house. Any room, really. Any set of walls. Anything to shield her from Max's question.

She couldn't sleep with the _ static. _That’s why she came out here. El didn’t know how to contain that buzzing, restless, room-filling urge to just _ wake Max up. _Max is awake now, but still it curls up inside El like a sleeping dragon. And El is terrified of it.

_ Why _ did she— it— want to wake Max up? El had thought she knew static: radio, television, the humming of store fridges; the foundations of her void. But she has absolutely no idea what this static _ wants _.

"There's this..." El clears her throat. There is a wild rhythm inside her, wilder than the thunderstorm, beating in her chest. "Thing. Inside me. I can't get it out.”

Max scrunches up her face. "Weird. What kind of thing?"

"I don't know. It feels...alive."

"Holy shit," and Max reels back, "If the Mind Flayer's in you—"

"No!" El shouts. El _ never _ shouts. "Not the Mind-Flayer!" Max's eyes are wide and horrified and El reaches out and puts her hands on her shoulders, leans forward, meets her eyes. "Max, it’s not him."

"You're sure?"

"Yes. Promise."

Max visibly sags. "Oh my god, El. Worst word choice _ever. _Like—“ she starts to laugh, “Honestly, _ Lucas _ levels of terrible, and he once had this party popper and said he had a bomb in his schoolbag. Don’t ever take talking tips from him, oh my god.”

El nods and leans back. They sit for a moment until Max’s laughter dies. When it does, Max asks, “So, what is this thing? Seriously?”

”I don’t know!”

”Okay, well, what happened? When did it start?”

El hesitates. “When I talked to you about Mike,” she says. “And when I, um, dumped his ass.” She takes a breath. “It’s still happening.”

Slowly, recognition dawns in Max’s eyes. El wants to run. She wants to get up and run across the Mayfields’ freezing wet lawn in bare feet, down the road, into the storm, all the way back to Hopper’s house into the calm and the warm where nothing looks at her like it _ knows _ her. And at the same time, she wants: in. Closer. The thing inside her thunders. El wants to sidle ever so slightly closer, rest her chin on Max’s shoulder like she does with Mike, and just look at her, just _ look—_

“Ignore it,” Max tells her.

El blanches. “What?”

“It’s only gonna hold you back,” Max declares. Her eyes are like fire. “This thing, it feels like butterflies, right?” Slowly, El nods. “It wants to control you. Don’t let it, El.”

“I don’t...understand.”

“You don’t have to. Just let him go.”

The storm is beginning to die again. El wants to question the ‘him’, she really does, but Max is confusing. And apparently, she _ hates _ the static. She hates it. El draws her knees up and hugs them, hoping to hide the sudden, unexplainable sting in her chest. 

Max’s eyes soften. "Hey, don't worry about it, okay? You’re better off without him.”

_ Him _ again. El is talking about _ her._ But doesn’t dare correct Max: there is something wild and unconquerable in the pronoun, and it scares her. She can’t say it out loud. 

The rainfall slackens. Max takes both the empty cups and stands. “I’m going inside,” she tells El. Her voice is strange. Strained. Like she’s asking for something. “Come back when you’re ready. We’ll find a way for you to properly get over Mike this time.”

Oh. 

Max is talking about _ Mike. _

Max thinks El was talking about_ Mike. _

“Max,” El calls out, just as the girl in question balances the hot chocolate mugs to shoulder the door open, “I didn’t mean...him. Mike.”

Max pauses in the threshold. She frowns. “What did you mean?”

El gets to her feet. It’s a long walk to the doorway, with Max’s eyes pinning her down every step of the way, and her courage fails her far before she reaches her. She ducks her head and takes a cup from Max’s hand. She ignores the question. “I’ll go inside with you,” she offers. 

There’s a beat of a moment. It’s slow, confused, but Max smiles. She _ smiles. _ A silent strike of lighting blooms round the corner of the neighbour’s house, and it flashes along the side of Max’s face, and in the few seconds before the thunder breaks El looks at her and her stomach does this massive, crazy lurch. Just one. Mike’s smile never did that. Maybe she’s about to be sick.

“Okay,” Max said, leaning back to open the door, “So, are we just standing here, or—”

El’s face _ burns. _She hurries off down the hall, and Max’s laughter, a short, hushed explosion of a sound, runs with her all the way into the kitchen. 

It takes a while to get back to Max’s room. El hovers awkwardly about the gloomy kitchen— Max stopped her from turning the light on, she didn’t want to wake her parents up— and watches Max do the dishes. It’s unnervingly quiet. No rain is audible, but now and then there’s the racket of thunder, muted and distant, like band kids practicing in another room. El asks to help. Max says it’s okay. Static fizzes in the air at her back and El escapes to the bathroom. 

The bathroom is quiet too. El brushes her teeth again. She looks in the mirror, toothbrush hanging in her mouth, and this time she doesn’t see ghosts; she doesn’t see Billy. She doesn’t see the Upside Down. It’s just her in a colourful shirt she borrowed from the bottom of Max’s closet, hair all out of place, shadows under her eyes. She doesn’t look like 011. El thinks she looks scared.

Not a Billy scared. A good scared. The dragon in her chest is scratching, uncurling. It’s coming awake. 

She goes to Max’s room in small footsteps. There’s a light under the door, and as she opens it, Max sits up in the bed. She’s looking right at her. 

“That took a while,” she comments. 

El nods. There’s a beat of silence. Max pulls back the covers. “Come here,” she says, softly, and it feels like a question. El lets go of the bottom of her shirt — she hadn’t realised she’d been tugging at it— and she goes to her. 

The blankets are cold and messy. El pulls a pile over her legs, copying Max as she leans against the headboard. It feels different than before. Max doesn’t reach for a comic. 

“Are you okay?” Max asks. “Like, for real. I found you out in the storm. You didn’t have to sleep over if you didn’t want to.”

“I’m okay. I wanted to.”

“As long as you’re sure.”

“I mean it.” In a moment of bravery, El nudges her hand against Max’s: she means it in a way that means a promise; something you can’t break. “I just needed...space.”

Max shifts. “Cool. Sorry for, um. Interrupting.”

“You came to look for me,” El says. “That’s what friends do.” And here’s the thing: the Mayfields aren’t capable of shyness, even El knows that, but for a moment Max_ is _. She turns her palm up. Her fingers slot loosely between El’s, light as the bars of a birdcage. 

“Friends?” she asks. 

El's heart misses a beat. 

“I don’t— aren’t we—”

“Friends,” Max says, a shine in her eyes, “You called me your friend.” Blankets twist, and suddenly she’s everywhere. Getting in El’s face. Ruffling her hair. The air fills with a sudden, raging kind of fondness, a kind that jumps up like wildfire, and they’re not quite fighting but almost, and Max headbutts her.

"Max, no, Max,” El laughs, pushing her away. “Max!” Max grins, all storm-tangled hair and oversized sleep shirt. It’s kind of unbearable. 

“I’m your friend,” she singsongs. Before El can react, she darts forward and kisses El’s forehead quickly, hands fluttering about her face but never touching, and then they fall away. Max sits back just as quick. El blinks.

And then Max is rushing into her next sentence: “I knew it, El, I_ told _ Lucas we’d be friends, even when you totally shoved me the first time we met. Which was Mike’s fault, by the way. God, I was getting so sick of just having stupid boys for friends, you have _ no _idea—”

El drops her head to Max’s shoulder. There’s a hitch and a breath of laughter in Max’s voice before the words go on, and they do go on; El doesn’t want to stop them; she just wants to be _ close _ to her. There’s a great big dragon flying circles inside her and she feels unsteady, off-balance, like she’s flying with it, and Max is the only thing pulling her back to the ground. El thinks Max has some kind of gravitational pull. (If that’s the right word. El still isn’t sure if Dustin explained gravity to her properly.)

They do end up getting some sleep. It takes a while, because Max is in a rambling mood and El is in a hyper-alert, awake one: but they do. The bedside lamp is switched off. The covers are untangled. Max and El lie facing each other, talking across the fists and elbows between them as grey morning grows earlier and earlier. If Max curls more closely toward her than she ever has before, El doesn’t mention it. The aftermath of the storm is like a different world. Every little sound is heightened; the shuffle of blankets, Max’s breathing; and the static is gone. Everything is close, and comfortable, and when El sleeps she doesn’t dream. 

She doesn’t dream. Not of Mike. Not of Kali. Not of the dripping recesses of a pool’s changing rooms, not of Heather in the ice bath, not of Billy and his piercing eyes. 

No. As Max mumbles some final something, and the last distant tremor of thunder runs through the bedframe, El closes her eyes. 

And she wakes to sunshine.

**Author's Note:**

> anyways. leave a comment or something if you liked!


End file.
